Daphne Frias | New York
This interview was conducted by Aletta Brady. Amaya Sangurima, Talia Fox, Iris Samputu, and Sophia Longsworth contributed to the production of this story.
Today we are hearing from Daphne Frias, an incredible 23-year old youth organizer from West Harlem in New York City. Climate change is personal to Daphne as they were diagnosed with cerebral palsy at a young age and work as an activist at the intersection of disability justice and climate justice. Having experienced environmental injustices and gentrification firsthand, Daphne is committed to organizing for climate justice solutions in their frontline community and beyond. And they have been working as a public health scholar for over 10 years. Here is Daphne’s story:
Key Facts
Low-resource populations and low-resource subpopulations in high-resource countries are experiencing a disproportionate amount of health effects from climate change.
Measured as Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), both the total and per capita burden are an order of magnitude greater among the poor. (How much disease would climate change cause?)
My name is Daphne Frias. I'm a 23 year-old youth organizer working on the intersections of disability and climate justice. Social justice is a huge passion of mine. Being disabled, I've learned how to advocate for myself and my community at a really young age. I understood quickly that the power of your voice and the power of storytelling are some of our most important tools for enacting change. Words are the building blocks of revolutions, and with our words, and with the power of our voices, anything can happen.
Born and raised in West Harlem, I've seen the disproportionality of what it's like to live in a low socioeconomic status as a lived reality. Especially in terms of the climate crisis, we see how racism plays heavily into urban planning as opposed to predominantly white communities, which have access to cleaner air, a cleaner environment, and less climate destroying infrastructures.
In my neighborhood, we have the largest bus depot for the MTA in New York City. All the main bus lines from Manhattan come out of this bus depot. So we're constantly being exposed to a lot of polluting factors. And it was then that I realized, oh, this is not an unplanned coincidence, like 90% of my friends have asthma. This is a systemic problem.
“The thing about the climate crisis and frontline communities, we often live in multiple jeopardy situations. How do you even talk about fighting the climate crisis when we don’t have food to eat, we don’t have a roof over our head, when we don’t even speak the language?”
West Harlem is not unlike many Black and brown communities all across the country. We live in a food desert. We live in places that lack open green spaces. We have a disproportionate number of crimes and destroying infrastructures, we face intense gentrification from Columbia University… Every year we lose neighbors, we lose tenants, and our elders are constantly being pushed out. And with that comes the loss of their stories and their experiences. We're constantly losing those valuable resources.
The thing about the climate crisis and frontline communities, we often live in multiple jeopardy situations. How do you even talk about fighting the climate crisis when we don't have food to eat, we don't have a roof over our head, when we don't even speak the language? So when I first started talking about the climate crisis in my neighborhood, everybody's like, you're crazy. Like, why are you talking about this when people can't afford their rent? And I was like, you're completely right. But it's understanding that the reason why you can't pay the rent and why the climate crisis exists are exactly the same. They come from the same systems of oppression that caused this inequity to exist in the first place. So you can't combat these issues in silos.
Now we have more white people living in our neighborhood, and people are listening to us. But they're not listening to the people who have lived in the community for all these years, who have been going to community board meetings and who've been trying to meet with their elected officials. In the last six years, we've been able to restore some of our parks and some of our green spaces. But that isn't because they were listening to us, it's because they want to make our community more amenable to higher socio-economic status individuals so that they can continue pushing people like me, who've lived here all their lives, out of this community.
I think it's important to remember that, with gentrification and climate change, comes the silencing of frontline communities and frontline voices, and this is a huge problem throughout the environmental justice movement as a whole, it's completely whitewashed and frontline communities are not listened to, especially communities of color. When my community board is trying to bring up environmental initiatives, it's always the white folks taking up that space.
But I began organizing within my community. And I've seen an incredible difference over just taking ownership over our community and our voice and saying that like, just because we have these labels on us, doesn't mean our lives don’t matter. Taking agency over our wellbeing doesn't make us villains. We have this right: healthcare is a right, clean environments are a right. We don't have to feel sorry about fighting for those things.
Disability Justice
Key Facts
Cerebral palsy (CP) is a group of disorders that affect a person’s ability to move and maintain balance and posture. CP is the most common motor disability in childhood. The symptoms of CP vary from person to person.
A person with severe CP might need to use special equipment to be able to walk, or might not be able to walk at all and might need lifelong care. A person with mild CP, on the other hand, might walk a little awkwardly, but might not need any special help. CP does not get worse over time, though the exact symptoms can change over a person’s lifetime. (CDC)
Disability is hard. there's days where I wake up and I'm like, this sucks, there are going to be bad days. But the overall experience of disability is one of the most empowering places I've been because we are a community that knows what it's like to not be seen. We have the ability to rely on each other and to build and to share resources. I cannot tell you how many times I've been stranded without medication without resources, and my community is always there. And I think if the rest of the world had that understanding that we all work together to make each other better, you'd be in a much better place.
I was only given a 25% chance to live when I was born. I was in the hospital for three months, and I had to have two blood transfusions. So needless to say, 23 year old Daphne was not wasn't supposed to be out here doing the most. When I was three years old, I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. In its most basic form, it is a neuromuscular disease that affects other muscles in your body and makes your muscles atrophy. So you have less control over your muscle tension and your muscles in general. But what was interesting about my diagnosis was that the word high functioning was tossed around a lot. What does high functioning mean? It's the most annoying word to me. It alienates people with disabilities and sort of makes you feel like you're not part of the [disabled] community in general... When I started going to doctors and hospitals, they actually wanted to do this major surgery on me to remove all of my lower extremities and replace them with metal. And my mom was like, yeah, we're not doing that. And shortly after she got me into this specialized preschool with early intervention services like physical therapy and occupational therapy. And by my graduation, I was able to walk across the stage. I had been working with my physical therapist for the whole duration of the school year. And then when I would come home, I would pretend like I couldn't do anything. So when my mom saw me at graduation, it was like a complete surprise to her. It was an amazing feeling…It was the first time she ever saw me walk. And this was something that every single one of my doctors said I was never going to be able to do. So I just remember her in the front row, just like losing her mind, like bawling. It was the first time that I realized that I could do anything that I set my mind to, no matter the expectations of other people.
Key Facts
Cerebral palsy impairs oral motor functions increasing the risk for aspiration pneumonia
(Krigger. (2006). Cerebral palsy: an overview. American Family Physician, 73(1), 91–100.)
I knew that education and being able to articulate myself was a way that I could take ownership over the way I was perceived. Being disabled, being a young woman of color, I knew that, especially the public school system in New York, they were going to try to box me into special education and other systems that were not beneficial to my growth as a student or as a person. I was actually one of the first young people within the public school system here in New York City to be in a, what they call a hybrid system, where I was receiving special education services in a general education classroom.
I have a history of contracting pneumonia every year, so my respiratory system is incredibly weak, which is why getting COVID was no surprise to me, but it made my lungs very, very weak and not able to withstand the levels of air pollution within my community. And it was how I realized that so many other people in my community were facing the same thing. Specifically with disabled people, we live at the nexus of multiple jeopardy situations. And when we talk about the climate crisis, one of the things we always think about is the increase of natural disasters and extreme weather in which people with disabilities don't have the privilege and the ability to evacuate swiftly. In last year's California wildfires, there's so many friends of mine who lost their mobility devices during these wildfires, oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, walkers, feeding tubes, IVs, you name it. There were so many things that were lost. We're consistently an afterthought in terms of evacuation plans.
“In last year’s California wildfires, there’s so many friends of mine who lost their mobility devices during these wildfires, oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, walkers, feeding tubes, IVs, you name it. There were so many things that were lost. We’re consistently an afterthought in terms of evacuation plans. ”
I think that disabled people can also be climate refugees. There's thousands, if not millions, of climate refugees, or people becoming climate refugees. Each year, some of those people are disabled or in the process of becoming disabled. So now not only do you not have a place to live, not have a country to call home, but you have these comorbidities that are making it incredibly hard for you to exist. In truth, disability is a lifelong thing. And it can happen to you at any moment. We've welcomed siblings into the disabled community because of COVID. We've welcomed people into the community because of protests, and because of the unrest that was happening last summer with the Black Lives Matter movement. Disability can always come...there is the natural progression of disability as we get older. Disability is not inherently bad. Society is the construct that teaches us that it is. Also, accommodations and the things that disabled people need benefit able bodied people as well...it benefits entire communities.
“The environmental justice movement likes to create solutions that don’t work for people with disabilities, because it’s easier to say that we don’t matter and that we’re invisible, and it makes people feel better about themselves”
As our climate changes, we [disabled people] become prisoners in our own homes. And that's incredibly frustrating because we're already facing barriers to access and equity and now we have to continue to be isolated. The climate crisis and environmental justice desperately need that innovation, need empathy and solution making tactics that disabled people have come to rely on for our entire lives.
I find it very hard to comprehend that the climate crisis and environmental justice have become a political issue. Like, how have we politicized the health of our Earth? Do we have another planet to live on? I don't think so...intrinsically, the climate crisis is a public health issue. Like, we have to have a public health framework in order to combat the climate crisis. I am in my first year of getting my MD MPH. I've been a public health scholar for 10 years.
When you look at social determinants of health, there's no way that you can separate those things that affect minority communities and how the climate crisis exists. It's as clear as day. I also think that a public health perspective creates equity and the fact that we have it makes us center the communities that are most impacted by the climate crisis.
How are we going to get everyone to understand that having content that has captioning, and has other accommodations for deaf and hard of hearing people is readily available in most of our social media? It's literally not complicated. I'm begging you please use alt text. Disability accommodations and Disability Justice should not be an afterthought. All justice is Disability Justice, because we fit into every single nexus and we fit into every single justice issue. And if I'm being incredibly honest, if you're not including people with disabilities in your environmental justice work or any justice, for that matter, you're not really fighting for justice. You're just fighting for a justice that's ablest and that fits into your parameters of what normal is, but justice doesn't discriminate. Justice is for everyone.
Key Facts
Ableism - discrimination or prejudice against individuals with disabilities
The environmental justice movement likes to create solutions that don't work for people with disabilities, because it's easier to say that we don't matter and that we’re invisible, and it makes people feel better about themselves and say, ‘Yes, we created this amazing solution.’ Well sorry to break it to you, that’s actually ableist and doesn't work. So you might want to take that back to the drawing board. It's very easy to not think about us because it doesn't benefit the overall movement. And it makes people feel better about their arbitrary solutions. There's increased isolation when we talk about access to transportation and mobility. A lot of disabled people live in care facilities on the outskirts of communities and towns, which means that they have less access to resources. And this has only been exacerbated during the pandemic. Society puts us on the outskirts of these things so that we're easily forgettable. But more than it hurting us, it's an incredible disadvantage to the movement in general.
I am a notorious plus one person... it's holding the systems accountable. I'm saying, These are the gaps I'm seeing within the representation. And with the conversations we are having, here are the people you should be including, even if that means you, yourself, are not part of the conversation. There's a huge pattern in the Youth Environmental Justice Movement, where it's the same voices over and over again. And it's like, honestly, I'm tired of hearing your voice. And even myself, there's times where I'm taking up too much space... we're all working together to create a more equitable and just movement. And there doesn't need to be this rat race of like, who gets the most promotion? Because at the end of the day, if you have a dead planet, who cares about how many followers you have on social media? It doesn't matter. What does your activism look like? If the internet went down tomorrow, do you have anything to show for your organizing? Over this Earth Month, I [held] my friends in the space of accountability. When we were launching these huge campaigns, were there people with disabilities in these campaigns? Some friends stepped up and some friends didn’t. That speaks volumes more than any other organizing that they may be doing.
“And it wasn’t until I got older that I realized, my disability is my greatest superpower. It makes me absolutely the person I was meant to be. It’s something that I always tell people, like if 20 years from now, they come up with a magical cure to take away my disability, I’d say absolutely not, because my disability is one of the proudest parts of myself. It makes me everything that I am.”
I always tell young organizers to also hold those organizations accountable...it's okay to say no, you can desperately want to be part of something but if it doesn't align with your heart there's no point. At the end of the day, when we're all wrinkly and old, like nobody's gonna remember that billboard that put you up in Times Square, they're gonna remember how you made your community better.
I wish more people understood the joy of communities like mine, where it isn't always just about like, we're poor, or people are dying, or people are struggling, there is joy here and like, it isn't, it isn't devoid of happiness. Yes, it's hard and there is struggle. But that doesn't mean that we don't find joy.
For so long, I didn't feel like I was part of the disabled community... I was just like, in this limbo of not knowing how to define myself. To the point where sometimes I even said, like, I didn't even feel disabled. And I had this internalized ableism against myself. And it wasn't until I got older that I realized, my disability is my greatest superpower. It makes me absolutely the person I was meant to be. It's something that I always tell people, like if 20 years from now, they come up with a magical cure to take away my disability, I’d say absolutely not, because my disability is one of the proudest parts of myself. It makes me everything that I am. And I've also learned so many things about people in life, because of my disability, and it's given me an immense amount of empathy and understanding of humans that I wouldn't have learned otherwise. And it's those same tools that make disabled people incredibly necessary in climate conversations. It's that resilience and that ability to come up with solutions, that innovation and that fight.
And, you know, I'm out here trying to be my ancestors’ wildest dreams, trying to achieve everything that they only wish that they could. And the only way I'm going to do that is by being my authentic self. And by embracing all the parts of me that make me who I am, my community has really uplifted and shaped me to be everything I am. And I think that a lot of people consider BIPOC youth to be less powerful, but I actually think we are some of those powerful people. Because we've learned to overcome adversity and to overcome people's perception of who they think we can be and the things that we can achieve to achieve things even greater than what they imagine.
Further Reading:
Jampel. (2018). Intersections of disability justice, racial justice and environmental justice. Environmental Sociology, 4(1), 122–135.
Ducy, & Stough, L. M. (2021). Psychological effects of the 2017 California wildfires on children and youth with disabilities. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 114, 103981–103981.